by Andrew Potok
Some of us, like Dot, wore occluders even down there. Though a powerful overhead battery of fluorescent lights hurt my eyes, I refused to wear occluders. I was assigned by the group to watch as best I could, then to report, after the session, any visual clues such as meaningful looks between our two leaders, their frustration, nervousness, or pleasure.
Often, someone like Little Fred came in late and squeezed his way by to find a seat, past Dr. Gruber, to Miss Hennessy’s right. En route he would collide theatrically with the back of Betty’s chair, and the ensuing antics—Fred’s writhing with pain, Betty’s giggles, Hank’s guffaws—would buy us a few more minutes. Then the giggles ended and we were inside the tense silence once more.
Miss Hennessy started. “Mr. Papadopoulos, would you care to tell us why you were crying yesterday?” Big Fred had cried because an old buddy of his died. As he answered now, he began to sob again. Big Fred was the oldest among us, perhaps sixty. He had told a couple of us about his dead friend, his confidant of long standing. “Did you feel a special closeness to your friend, Mr. Papadopoulos, because you were in the middle of grieving for your eyes?” Miss Hennessy asked.
“I don’t know,” Fred said as he blew his nose loudly.
“Don’t you associate the death of your friend with the death of your eyes, Mr. Papadopoulos?”
“I don’t know,” Fred answered. “I guess so.” He was being set up for things he didn’t seem able to handle, at least not now. The rest of the group started to stir uncomfortably. Miss Hennessy’s measured questions continued.
“Are you crying for your friend or are you crying for your blindness, Mr. Papadopoulos?”
Fred’s face contorted into a kind of shocked puzzlement, eyes and mouth wide open, exposing by the light of the fluorescents his newly installed teeth, alabaster white in the center of a wet, twisted face. A pitiful, defeated moan came from that mouth.
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” blurted a strong voice on my right. Miss Hennessy flushed and glared at Ray. He was tough, with a boxer’s pummeled nose and gruff voice.
“Mr. Long,” said Dr. Gruber, speaking for the first time, “why are you so angry?”
“I’m not so angry,” Ray snapped, “but can’t she see he’s crying? I mean, give the guy a break.” Miss Hennessy was scribbling furiously now. I could see it, everyone else could hear it.
“Tell us, Mr. Long,” she said, controlled but bloodthirsty, “you were a childhood diabetic and now you are quite blind. Tell us if you will, Mr. Long, why, in spite of the obvious dangers, you and your wife are about to have a baby.”
Pandemonium erupted in the cellar. Ray was pale and unintelligible, others were yelling in his defense. Some argued and some sat silently with their heads lowered, wishing this were all a bad dream. Words like cocksucker and motherfucker, uncommon in mixed company at St. Paul’s, pierced the humid cellar air. The pipes banged and whooshed. Miss Hennessy’s ears were red, but she sat through it like a trouper. They had engaged us, and I could almost see the triumphant expressions on their faces as they dutifully awaited a lull, to start again on a more cooperative level.
Their technique was dizzying. They now offered us their understanding, and we ate from their hands. We listened as they pronounced judgment on Little Fred’s denial, Ray’s and my guilt, and everyone’s fear and depression, as they acknowledged, with smiles and supportive phrases, our stories of misunderstanding and neglect, our bitterness for having lost whatever equality or superiority we might have once had.
Miss Hennessy did what she was supposed to do. She provoked and dug below the surface. She was the only one who had the courage to inform Tommy that he would look better if he covered his ghoulish, bulging eyes with sunglasses. Her training and her years in tiresome agencies for the blind hadn’t entirely eroded her humanity. The whole St. Paul’s staff must have wearied of the same recurring problems, year after year, group after group: the skills learned and forgotten, the jobs almost won, the suicides and early diabetic deaths, the promise gone sour, the short-lived hope vanished.
I paced constantly at St. Paul’s, inside the building, round and round the lobby, through the creaky wooden corridors, in and out of the empty braille room, up and down the cellar stairs. I walked through the cold, unlit cellar room that housed some half-dozen typewriters on which we had lessons three times a week, and back upstairs into the TV room, where I often found Big Fred and Herman with their ears turned to the tube, listening to the Danny Thomas show or Lucille Ball reruns. “That’s got to be Andy,” Fred would say as the floorboards grumbled and I stood on the threshold looking at the two of them. I would often fix the flickering vertical hold on the old set and go back into the lobby, where I had rearranged the chairs into a circle, an innovation that met with Miss Hennessy’s disapproval. “The rows were good enough for all the groups before you, Mr. Potok,” she had said. But everybody liked the geniality of the circular arrangement, and Miss Hennessy had to give in. I would sit for a moment next to Ray or Margie or Hank to chat, and then spring up again to pace or walk outside under the big old trees that spread over the ample grounds. I often left the estate altogether now and, slipping on my occluders, practiced with my cane on the deserted side streets of Newton.
I knew that Kathleen was particularly aware of my restlessness and energy. She seemed to enjoy the breeze that swept across her cheeks as I flew by, and she often interposed with a request or a comment. “Hey, Andy, run down and get me a Coke, would you?” and I’d fly down the back stairs to the soda machine. “Sit down a minute, speedy,” she would whisper, blushing, “and let me feel your beard”—which had grown an inch or so since my first day there. And as she took a sip on her Coke, she brushed a cold, wet fingertip along my ear and let it slip tenderly to the side of my neck. Kathleen liked my nervousness, especially since no one else moved much in the first weeks of our training. And the one who moved least was Katie herself, who would sit like a proper matron with her legs tightly crossed and her sleek black hair pulled severely into a bun. During the day, she hoped to go unnoticed so that she could avoid the exertion of a mobility lesson in Boston traffic or even a braille class, for which she was often unprepared. She would hail me on one of my rounds of the building to whisper into my ear, her hands cupped around it and her breathy voice exciting me: “You sit next to me in braille class, sweet-heart, and when that deaf old bat calls on me, for Christ’s sake, help me.”
Succeeding as a student at St. Paul’s was terribly important to me, not so much because I couldn’t get along in the world without these blindness skills, but because I simply needed to succeed at something. For a long time, I felt that there was nothing much in my life to praise. Since painting had gone and its possibilities for rewards with it, I craved any reassurance and success. I felt physically damaged, professionally finished, visually dying, but at St. Paul’s I could shine in mobility, braille, videation, typing, and techniques of daily living. Speeding down Centre Street, crossing after a moment’s careful listening for cars, turning as the street curved, going as fast as I normally would, that was triumph, that was worthy of praise. I wanted Linda to fill my file folder with superlatives, I wanted to be challenged by ever tougher problems. I wanted Cristofanetti to invent ever newer, more grueling events for me to excel in. On those mornings when Linda decided that I was getting too far ahead of the others and asked me to sit with her in a Watertown coffee shop to tell me about her tangled love life, I felt cheated of new citations for distinguished service or bravery.
In braille class, I wanted to be the best. The “deaf old bat” was Mr. Prendergast, an ex–high-school football coach from Lexington, now in his eighties. He was neither blind nor a braillist. As a matter of fact, he corrected our braille assignments by holding them obliquely to the light and, instead of feeling the raised dots with his fingers, he read the tiny shadows each dot cast on the paper. He wasn’t a particularly good example for us, who were struggling to feel each little cluster of dots with whatever wa
s available—the pads of our index fingers or the edge of our fingernails.
In the braille room, we sat at desks pushed up against three walls, while Mr. Prendergast paced slowly in the middle of the room, his large shoes shuffling. The arrangement wasn’t supposed to bother the blind. We didn’t need a view, that was true, but we felt the odd use of space as a kind of irritating thoughtlessness. “Shit,” said Ray, “it’s like being stuffed into an undersized coffin.” Prendergast tried to get us to learn as he must have begged and beaten his ninth graders sixty years before.
“What’s the matter with you, Kathleen?” he rasped. “You’re not entirely stupid. Why don’t you study?” Katie mouthed obscenities under her breath while I tried to find a way to communicate the answer. I reached to write it out on her leg or whisper into her ear but couldn’t always be sure of Prendergast’s whereabouts.
“Okay,” Mr. Prendergast finally pronounced, “tell her, Andy,” and as I muttered: “Dad fed Gabe a bad beef bag,” the old coach would smack me on the back, saying, “Atta boy, Andy, way to go!”
When I first laid the palm of my hand on a brailled piece of paper, it felt like gritty sandpaper. To distinguish a single raised dot in a sea of others seemed at first as impossible as distinguishing a grain of sand on a beach. It took a lot of touching, touching in a way so delicate as to have no analogues in my experience, to learn to separate the whole mass of them into clusters and then to interpret each cluster of one to six dots as individual letters, numbers, or contractions of several letters. We heard fantastic stories of speed-reading braillists who could scan a whole page in seconds, both hands working with great finesse and speed, but to us whose fingernails scratched the little embossed dots off the paper in trying to prove their very existence, the tales seemed apocryphal. Braille wasn’t easy for those of us whose hands were callused, nor for the diabetics, whose extremities suffered from poor circulation. But we all learned rudimentary braille, not good enough to read books, but sufficient to label tapes, records, files, cans of food, the dials and knobs of appliances.
After Katie stopped denying the fact that she was blind, she learned quickly and well, but in those first few weeks, she would plead an upset stomach or lower-back spasms or menstrual cramps to get out of instruction of any kind. We all knew she was still traumatized by the accident that had cut both her optic nerves, but we also knew that quite often she was tending to hangovers produced the night before at Howard Johnson’s or a grubby little bar in Newton Center. The Cokes I would bring her served as a diluting bath for the gin consumed the night before.
Evenings, we sat around in the lobby, the only common room we had. We talked or played penny-ante poker. With poker it was no contest. I would read everyone’s up cards to them, while they searched for the braille dots on their hidden cards.
“What d’you say, Andy, a queen of what?”
“Queen of spades for Fred, little deuce of hearts for Ray, jack of clubs for Hank, and I’ve got a big ten of diamonds.”
“Deuce of what?” Ray would ask.
“Hearts, Ray.”
“And me?” Katie wanted to know. “Jesus, Andy, I forgot. And listen, honey, some son of a bitch scratched the goddamn braille right off this hole card. . . .”
Poker was exhausting, as was chess, especially since there wasn’t a complete set of pieces. Memorizing the whole board anew with each move was too much for us mediocre players.
Late at night, we often ordered pizza, brought by taxi, but the best evenings were spent drinking in the neighborhood bars. I much preferred to go with only one or two people, feeling self-conscious and stigmatized when we went as a large group. I could sometimes see the barman’s perplexity or revulsion as he stared at six or seven blind people with white canes tapping their way merrily into his place for an evening’s entertainment. During those evenings, after a couple of drinks, Katie would often tell me stories of her sighted life, stories of cruising with the local cops or the local hoods or both, stories of shake-downs and roundups and high adventure.
During the first couple of months at St. Paul’s I didn’t much want to go home for weekends, even though everyone else in our group went. I felt cozy where I was and feared the discomfort and threat, even with my own family, of sighted, “normal,” life and expectations. On those weekends at St. Paul’s I practiced cane travel, listened to my tapes of C. Wright Mills’s The Marxists or Rudolf Arnheim’s Visual Thinking, studied braille, typed, did exercises on a broken-down stationary bicycle in the cellar. I ate alone or with some of the old people at St. Raphael’s, which housed the geriatric blind. If friends came to visit, I’d have a coffee or drink off the property with them and impatiently hurry back to the Center alone, explaining that I had unfinished work there. I knew I’d be back in the real world soon enough.
Sometimes, over the weekends I spent at St. Paul’s, Katie would call from a noisy bar in Fall River or Providence. In these drunken, sexy calls, she would attempt to describe in her gravelly whiskey voice what we might be doing together at that very moment if either she were back at the Center or I were with her in the bar. As the weekends came to an end, I would eagerly await everyone’s return, especially Katie’s. She would usually be brought back in a long black Cadillac that stopped right in the front of the arched entrance. A small heavy man with black wavy hair would get out slowly from the driver’s seat, walk around the car, help Katie out, and walk her inside. She wore her most sedate clothes for these occasions: heels, stockings, a little furry animal around her neck. The short man would lead her by her elbow, help her into a chair in the lobby, deposit her overnight bag under the rack of coats near the door to the women’s quarters, and, without turning toward her again, walk back to his car and drive away. She sat for a while, listening to who was present, and if she heard my voice, she’d ask for a Coke. She later told me that her companion was Frankie.
“Oh, yeah? Who’s Frankie?” I asked.
“You know,” she said. “Frankie. I told you about Frankie. He’s the big man in the area.”
Katie was the only one in our group who was completely blind. She saw nothing, not light, not shadow. Not only were her optic nerves totally cut in two, but some months after, recovering from the accident, she walked, eyes first, into the prongs of a wall telephone and had, she confided to me toward the end of our stay at St. Paul’s, two prosthetic glass eyes.
My feelings of belonging were undermined by the people who sometimes came, unannounced, to visit me during the week. Each person in our closely knit group had come to represent a heroic struggle, victory over overwhelming odds, a frightening and sorrowful tale. But when we were seen as a group by an outsider, I felt us as inmates in a grotesque zoo, institutionalized freaks in an asylum. When visitors entered the portals of our weird institution, they saw Little Fred groping, a hand extended in front of his face, fluttering his inoperative eyes uncontrollably, defending himself with each step against some hidden enemy. As he moved, his jerky motions, his suspicious sweeps of an area with his cane or his hand, his fitful starts and sideways detours conveyed not the assured student of a new independence but a confused macho swagger gone wrong. Or these visitors saw lovely Margie rising from her chair to smack into a half-opened door or to be snarled up, like a fish in a net, among a rack full of hanging coats. To an outsider, these scenes were confusing and wrong, unseemly, even shocking. Seeing one stumbling blind person has its own tension and fascination, I thought, but intruding on a herd of us, bumping into one another, into walls and doors, tripping over canes, seemed to me like kicking over a rock to find a bunch of albino lemmings scurrying for cover.
When my friends Pat and Paul, who lived nearby, came once or twice a week to read aloud to me, I made sure to wait for them outside. The moment they got out of their car, I whisked them through the lobby and down the stairs into the basement, where we sat among the clattering pipes, sipping the bottle of Scotch they sometimes brought. Over the four months of my stay in Newton, we read all of Kropotkin a
loud.
After one very busy day, crammed full of mobility, braille, shop, Cristofanetti’s videation, and the technique of daily living, I went to bed early and was falling asleep to the Cavatina of Beethoven’s Thirteenth Quartet when I heard a crash and loud voices downstairs. Katie was back from Howard Johnson’s, and she was lusciously, wantonly drunk. I heard my name. I heard the canes hanging on a rack near the front door hit heavily, making a sound like distant firecrackers. One of the standing ashtrays fell with a thud and rolled grittily down the linoleum floor. “Andy, where are you, you son of a bitch?” I heard her wail. Ray was with her, and I felt sure that he would quiet her and put her to bed. But Ray wasn’t doing well either. He growled and groaned and hit the wall with a terrible thump. When he, a diabetic, was that drunk, it usually meant trouble. He caromed off the walls of the stairwell going up, fell into bed, and began to snore heavily.
“Wait up, you bastard,” Katie yelled as she reached the door leading upstairs to the men’s dormitory. “Where the fuck is Andy?” she bellowed as the hydraulic closer slammed the door to the stairwell shut behind her. She stood silently for a moment. No one answered. Then I heard the whoosh of her cane. It smacked the wall hard. She was furious; furious for not seeing, for feeling horny, for being denied the pleasures of the eyes. We were all furious about that. “Come on, baby, let’s do it,” she said. “Say something, goddamn it!” She began to climb the stairs, her cane bouncing behind.
